Lectures on Russian Literature: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy

6. One other strange fact in the art of Turgenef is explained by this fighting essence of his being. There is no growth, development, visible in Turgenef. He lived to what is for Russian men of letters an advanced age: he died when over sixty years old; yet, beginning with his first great work of art, “Rudin,” and ending with his last great work of art, “Virgin Soil,” through all his masterpieces, he remains the same. His six great novels, “Rudin,” “A Nest of Noblemen,” “On the Eve,” “Fathers and Sons,” “Smoke,” and “Virgin Soil,” form indeed an ascending scale, but not as works of art; as such, they are all on the same highest plane. And it would be difficult to find any canon of art according to which one could be placed above the other. Only when viewed as different modes of warfare, do they represent the different stages of his soul's life; but this only in so far as they reflect at the same time the state of the enemy's forces, against whom he found it necessary to re-equip himself from time to time. As an artist, then, Turgenef is not progressive; when his art comes to him, it comes like Minerva from Jupiter's head, – fully made, fully armed; and had it even come undeveloped, it would have had, in his case, to remain thus. For growth, development, needs time, needs leisure, needs reflection, needs rest; and of all this, on the field of battle, there is none to be had. Onward or backward, conquer or perish, but stand still on the field of battle thou must not. And while it was not given to Turgenef to conquer, neither was it given to the enemy to conquer him. Turgenef, therefore, as he lived a fighter, so he died a fighter.

7. Turgenef, then, had a life-long enemy; this enemy was Russian autocracy.

8. Born in 1818, in the same year with the autocrat of Russia, who afterwards dreaded him as his bête noir, he already in his childhood had the opportunity to learn the weight of the iron hand of Nicolas. Scarcely was he seven years old when the news came to his father's household that the family name so dear to them, and hitherto a synonym of honor both in and out of Russia, had been disgraced; that Nicolai Turgenef, one of the most faithful servants of the country under Alexander I., the younger of the two celebrated brothers, and a near relative of Ivan, had been sentenced to Siberian hard labor for life, – sentenced under circumstances which could not but shock the sense of justice not only of the trustful boy, but also of those whom maturer age had accustomed to the methods of the government. Nicolai Turgenef was condemned as one of the Decembrists, and the days of the youth of Ivan were the days when the Decembrists were looked up to as the first martyrs of Russian liberty. Pushkin, the friend of the leaders of the insurrection, and the singer of the “Ode to Liberty,” was then worshipped by the youth of Russia as poet was worshipped never before; to be related to the Decembrists was therefore a privilege, and to oppose autocracy in thought at least thus became a kind of family pride. Moreover, contrary to most Russian aristocrats, Sergei Turgenef conducted the early education of his gifted son himself; and the son of the conscientious father, when taken out into the world, could not but feel the discord between the peaceful life, rigid conduct, and high ideals of his home on the one hand, and the gloomy struggle for existence, lax morals of the officials, and the low standards of the world about him on the other. When Turgenef therefore was introduced into society, he was already saturated with revolutionary ideas, and it was not long before he found the atmosphere of his native land stifling; and already, at the age of nineteen, he had to face the question whether to stay and endure, or – to flee. The boy of nineteen cannot endure; go then from Russia he must, but go – whither? Fortunately, just beyond the western border there lay a country which had already proved the promised land of others equally defiant with Turgenef. Germany already harbored Stankevitch, Granofsky, Katkof, and Bakunin. The youth of Russia of those days had metaphorically cried to the Germans what a thousand years before them the Slavs had cried literally to the Varangians: “Our land is wide, and overflowing with abundance; but of order in it there is none. Come ye, therefore; and rule over us, and restore order among us!” Germany thus became the land of milk and honey for the Russians hungry in spirit. Whatever had any ambition looked to a visit to Germany with the same longing with which a Mohammedan looks to the shrines of Mecca.

9. Berlin was the first halting-station of the pilgrims; Böck was lecturing there on Greek literature, Zumpt on Roman antiquities, and Werder was expounding the philosophy of the man who boasted or complained of being understood by only one man, and that one misunderstood him. To these masters in the education of hair-splitting flocked almost all who became celebrated afterwards in Russia's public life, and even the government was sending students to Berlin at public expense. To these masters Turgenef also went, hearing Greek literature and Roman antiquities by day, and committing to memory the elements of Greek and Latin grammar by night. For in the Russian university, where Turgenef had hitherto spent two years, the professors were appointed not because of their knowledge of Latin and Greek, but because of their knowledge of military tactics.

10. When after two years Turgenef returned to his native land, he brought back with him, indeed, a high knowledge of Latin grammar, but a total ignorance of the highest aims of life. He brought back with him a religious scepticism, and a metaphysical pessimism, which colored henceforth his whole life, and therefore his artistic works. For those were the days when men yet believed that the great problems of the soul in its relation to the gods and to men could be solved not so much by living and by doing, as by disputing and by talking; those were the days when the philosopher's stone, turning all things into gold, was sought not in a rule for the conduct of life, such as “Love thy neighbor,” or “Do unto others,” but rather in the barren, egg-dancing, acrobatically-balanced formula, “What is, is right.” Those were the days when Hegel was supreme in philosophy because of his obscurity, as Browning is now supreme in poetry because of his; the shrivelled, evaporated, dead grain of wheat was prized all the more because it had been searched out with painful toil from the heap of chaff. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” The fruit of the deep study of Browning is an intimate knowledge of the use of English particles; and the fruit of the devoted study of Hegel was an intimate knowledge of metaphysical verbiage: being, substance, essence, and absolute. But of life-giving nourishment there was none to be had. The barrenness of all this, Turgenef indeed soon did perceive, but when the disenchantment came, his blood was already poisoned; his very being was eaten into by doubt, and almost to the very end of his days Turgenef remained a fatalistic sceptic, a godless pessimist; not till his old age did he espy the promised land. It was only when he witnessed with his own eyes the boundless self-sacrifice of the revolutionists, when the old man was moved by the heroism of the young Sophie Bardine even to the kissing of the very sheet upon which the girl's burning words to her judges were printed, – then, indeed, he regained his faith. He now hoped for his country, and stood even ready to become the head of the revolutionary movement in Russia; but for his artistic career all this came too late. In fact, his faith in God he never regained, though his hope for man did come back at last in his old age with the glow of his younger days.

11. This fundamental philosophic scepticism which had poisoned Turgenef's mind throughout the best years of his life accounts for a striking change which in time took place in the method of his art. Hitherto his art had been photographic of individuals. His “Memoirs of a Sportsman” is a gallery, not of ideals, not of types, but of actual men, – a gallery put on exhibition for the same end for which the rogues' gallery is exposed at the police headquarters. It is a means towards the welfare of the country. But after that book, when the scepticism had become part of his being, his method changes. For he now becomes convinced that the misrule of Russia is not so much due to the government as to the people themselves; that existence is in itself evil; that salvation, therefore, if it can come at all, must come not from without, but from within; that reform, therefore, was needed not so much for the institution, as for the men themselves. And to him men are diseased. He no longer therefore paints individual men, but henceforth he paints types; just as the physician first studies the disease not as affecting this patient or that, but as likely to affect all men, every man.

12. For much of this scepticism before life and irreverence before God Turgenef had to thank the paternal government of his fatherland. There are indeed those to whom sorrow comes like a messenger from the skies above, and lifts them heavenward on its wings. Turgenef alas! was not one of these. His was one of those souls whom sorrow deprives not only of the joys of the present, but also of the hopes of the future; and the government saw to it that of sorrows poor Turgenef have enough. Homelessness is an affliction to all sons of Adam, but to none is the sorrow of exile so intense as to the Russian. And to exile Turgenef was soon driven. Hid under glowing pictures of nature and fascinating figures of men, the real meaning of the “Memoirs of a Sportsman,” while they appeared in detached sketches, eluded readily enough the Argus-eyed censor. But when these sketches were gathered into a living book, then whatever had eye could behold, and whatever had ear could hear, their heavenly message. The book therefore creates a sensation, the censor is astir, hurried consultation takes place, his Majesty himself is roused; but all this too late; the living book can no longer be strangled. The government saw that the monster was hydra-headed, and resolved to let it alone rather than by cutting one of its heads to rouse twenty in its stead. The book then was spared, but the writer was henceforth doomed; and the occasion for the final blow is soon enough at hand. The great Gogol had at last departed. The enthusiastic Turgenef writes a letter about the dead master, and calls him a great man. “In my land only he is great with whom I speak, and only while I am speaking with him,” had said Paul the father; and Nicolas proved a worthy son. “In Russia there shall be no great men,” saith the Tsar; and Turgenef is arrested. High-stationed dame indeed intercedes for the gifted culprit. “But remember, madame,” she is told, “he called Gogol a great man.” “Ah,” high-stationed protectress replies, “I knew not that he committed that crime!” Which crime, accordingly, Turgenef expiates with one month's imprisonment in the dungeon, and two years' banishment to his estates. Only when the heir to the throne himself appeased his enraged sire was Turgenef allowed to go in peace. Once master over himself again, Turgenef hesitated no longer. He loved, indeed, his country much, but he loved freedom more; and like a bird fresh from the cage away flew Turgenef beyond the sea. The migrating bird returns, indeed, in the spring; but for Turgenef there was no longer any spring on Russian soil, and once abroad, he became an exile for life.

13. I have said that the heroes of his six great novels are not photographs, but types. I venture to say that neither Turgenef himself nor any other Russian ever knew a Bazarof, a Paul Kirsanof, a Rudin, a Nezhdanof. But as in the generic image of Francis Galton the traits of all the individuals are found whose faces entered into the production of the image, so in the traits of Turgenef's types every one can recognize some one of his acquaintance. And such is the life which the master breathes into his creations, that they become not only possible to the reader, but they actually gain flesh and blood in his very presence.

14. And of these types, Turgenef, in harmony with the advance of his own warfare, has furnished a progressive series. Accordingly the earliest depicted under the impression of profound despair is the type of the superfluous man, – the man, who not only does nothing, but can do nothing, struggle he never so hard. And the superfluous man not only is impotent, but he knows his impotence, so that he is dead in soul as well as in body. This brief sketch of a living corpse, written as early as 1850, forms thus the prologue, as it were, to all his future tragedies. From this depth of nothingness Turgenef, however, soon rises to at least the semblance of strength; and while Rudin is at bottom as impotent as Tchulkaturin, he at least pretends to strength. Rudin, then, is the hero of phrases, the boaster; he promises marvels, he charms, he captivates; but it all ends in words, and Rudin perishes as needlessly as he lived needlessly. In “Fathers and Sons,” however, Bazarof is no longer a talker; he already rises to indignation and rebellion; he lives out his spirit, and stubbornly resists society, religion, institutions. From Bazarof Turgenef ascends still higher to Nezhdanof in “Virgin Soil,” whose aggressive attitude is already unmistakable. Nezhdanof no longer indulges in tirades against government, but he glumly organizes the revolutionary forces for actual battle. Lastly, Turgenef arrives at the highest type of the warrior, at Sophia Perofskya; and this his last type he paints in brief epilogue, just as his first type he had painted in brief prologue. What this his last type meant to Turgenef is best seen from the short prose-poem itself.

I see a huge building; in its front wall a narrow door opens wide; behind the door gloomy darkness. At the high threshold stands a girl, a Russian girl.

Frost waves from that impenetrable darkness, and with the icy breeze comes forth from the depth of the building a slow, hollow voice.

“O thou, eager to step across this threshold, knowest thou what awaits thee?”

“I know,” answers the girl.

“Cold, hunger, hatred, ridicule, scorn, insolence, prison, illness, death itself!”

“I know it.”

“Complete isolation, loneliness.”

“I know it… But I am ready. I shall endure all the sorrows, all the blows.”

“Not only at the hands of your enemies, but also at the hands of your family and friends.”

“Yes, even at the hands of these.”

“'Tis well… Are you ready for the sacrifice?”

“Yes.”

“For nameless sacrifice? Thou shalt perish; and not one, not one even shall know whose memory to honor.”

“I need no gratitude nor pity; I need no name.”

“And art thou ready even for – crime?”

The girl dropped her head.

“Yes, even for crime am I ready.”

The voice renewed not its questionings forthwith.

“Knowest thou,” spake the voice for the last time, “that thou mayest be disenchanted in thy ideals, that thou yet mayest come to see that thou wert misguided, and that thy young life has been wasted in vain?”

“This also I know, and yet I am ready to enter.”

“Enter, then.”

The girl stepped over the threshold, and the heavy curtain dropped behind her. “Fool!” some one muttered behind her. “Saint!” came from somewhere in reply.

15. These, then, were the two leading traits of this man Turgenef. He had the fighting temperament of the warrior in his heart, and the doubting temperament of the philosopher in his head: to the first he owed the choice of his road; to the second, the manner of traversing it. His six great works of art are all tragedies. Rudin dies a needless death on a barricade; Insarof dies before he even reaches the land he is to liberate; Bazarof dies from accidental blood-poisoning and Nezhdanof dies by his own hand. Here again critics are at hand with an explanation which does not explain. Turgenef, the artist, the poet, the creator, does not know, they say, how to dispose of his heroes at the end of his stories, and he therefore kills them off. The truth, however, is that the sceptic, pessimistic Turgenef could not as an artist faithful to his belief do aught else with his heroes than to let them perish. For to him cruel fate, merciless destiny, was not mere figure of speech, but reality of realities. To Turgenef, life was at bottom a tragedy; and whatever the auspices under which he sent forth his heroes, he felt that sooner or later they must become victims of blind fate, brute force, of the relentlessly grinding, crushing mill of the gods.

16. I have thus attempted to give you an interpretation of Turgenef which perhaps explains not only his life but also the peculiar direction of his works; not only the vices of his intellect, but also the virtues of his art.

17. For the first great virtue of Turgenef's art is his matchless sense of form, as of a builder, a constructor, an architect. As works of architecture, of design, with porch and balcony, and central body, and roof, all in harmonious proportion, his six novels are unapproachable. There is a perfection of form in them which puts to shame the hopelessly groping attempts at beauty of harmonious form of even the greatest of English men of letters. As a work of architecture, for instance, “Virgin Soil” bears the same relation to the “Mill on the Floss” that the Capitol at Washington bears to the Capitol at Albany. The one is a rounded-out thing of beauty, the other an angular monstrosity. Walter Scott in England, and Mr. Howells in America, are the only English writers of fiction who possess that sense of form which makes Turgenef's art consummate; unfortunately, Walter Scott has long since been discarded as a literary model, and Mr. Howells is not yet even accepted.

18. And the second great virtue of Turgenef's art is the skill with which he contrives to tell the most with the least number of words, the skill with which he contrives to produce the greatest effect with the least expenditure of force. There is a compactness in his stories which I can only describe as Emersonian. Of his six great novels, only one has as many as three hundred pages; of the other five, not one has over two hundred. Turgenef's art is thus in striking contrast with that required by the English standard of three volumes for every novel. For what is to English and American society the greatest of social virtues was to Turgenef the greatest of artistic vices. As an artist, Turgenef detested above all cleverness, – that accomplishment which possesses to perfection the art of smuggling in a whole cartload of chaff under the blinding glare of a single phosphorescent thoughtlet; that cleverness which like all phosphorescent glows can only change into a sickly paleness at the slightest approach of God's true sunlight, of the soul's true force. Of this virtue of compactness his works offer examples on almost every page; but nowhere are its flowers strewn in such abundance as in his “Diary of a Superfluous Man.”

19. This work, though only covering some sixty pages, written as it was at the age of thirty-two, when Turgenef stood as yet at the threshold of his artistic career, is in fact, as it were, an epitome of all Turgenef's forces as an artist. While in power of impression it is the peer of Tolstoy's “Ivan Ilyitsh,” with which it has a striking family resemblance, it surpasses Tolstoy's sketch in the wealth of delicately shaded gems of workmanship, which glow throughout the worklet. (1) In the small provincial town, for instance, the lion from St. Petersburg, Prince N., captures the hearts of all. A ball is given in his honor, and the prince, says Turgenef, “was encircled by the host, yes, encircled as England is encircled by the sea.” My ball-giving, my lion-hunting friend, thou knowest the singular felicity of that one word here, – encircled! (2) The superfluous man's beloved is at last seduced by the lionized prince, and she becomes the talk of the town. A good-natured lieutenant, now first introduced by Turgenef, calls on the wretched man to console him, and the unhappy lover writes in his Diary: “I feared lest he should mention Liza. But my good lieutenant was not a gossip, and, moreover, he despised all women, calling them, God knows why, salad.” This is all the description Turgenef devotes to this lieutenant; but this making him despise women under the appellation of half-sour, half-sweet conglomerate of egg-and-vegetable salad, describes the lieutenant in two lines more faithfully than pages of scientific, realistic photography. (3) Before the ruin of poor Liza becomes known, and while the prince, her seducer, is still on the height of lionization, he is challenged to a duel by Liza's faithful lover. The superfluous man wounds the prince's cheek; the prince, who deems his rival unworthy of even a shot, retaliates by firing into the air. Superfluous man is of course crushed, annihilated, and he describes his feelings thus: “Evidently this man was bound to crush me; with this magnanimity of his he slammed me in, just as the lid of the coffin is slammed down over the corpse.” (4) You think, then, that the sufferings of the despairing lover as he sees his beloved going to ruin, into the arms of the seducer, are indescribable? But not to Turgenef. Says again the superfluous man in his Diary: “When our sorrows reach a phase in which they force our whole inside to quake and to squeak like an overloaded cart, then they cease to be ridiculous.” Verily, only those who have been shaken to the very depths of their being can understand the marvellous fidelity of this image, the soul quaking and squeaking like an overloaded cart, – all the more faithful because of its very homeliness. Do not wonder, therefore, when the last, intensest grief, the consciousness of being crushed by his rival, finds in his Diary the following expression: (5) “And so I suffered,” says the superfluous man, “like a dog whose hind parts had been crushed in by the cart-wheel as it passed over him.” A more powerful description of agony, methinks, is not found even in Gogol's laughter through tears.

20. And the third great virtue of Turgenef's art is his love of Nature; and here I know not where to look for the like of him, unless to another great master of Russian letters, – to Tolstoy. For Gogol is indeed also a painter, but only a landscape-painter, while Turgenef makes you feel even the breeze of a summer eve.

21. So thrilled is his being with the love of Nature, that all her moods find a ready response in his sensitive soul. The joy of the sunshine, the melancholy of the sky shut down by huge cloud, the grandeur of the thunder, the quiver of the lightning, the glow of the dawn, the babble of the brook, and even the waving of the grass-blade, – all these he reproduces with the fidelity of one who reveres Nature. Turgenef has thus at least one element of the highest religiousness, – reverence towards the powers of Nature superior to man; a reverence the possession of which he himself would perhaps have been the first to deny, since consciously he was an irreverent agnostic. But his soul was wiser than his logic; and however dead his head might declare the universe to be, his hand painted it as if alive. This, for instance, is how he describes a storm: —

“Meanwhile, along with the evening was approaching a thunder-storm. Already ever since noon the air had been close, and from the distance there was coming a low grumbling. But now the broad cloud that had long been resting like a layer of lead on the very edge of the horizon began to grow, and to be visible from behind the trees: the stifling atmosphere began to tremble more visibly, shaken stronger and stronger by the approaching thunder; the wind rose, howled abruptly through the trees, became still, howled again protractedly, and now it whistled. A sombre darkness ran over the ground, chasing swiftly away the last glimmer of the dawn; the thick clouds breaking to pieces suddenly began to float, and drove through the sky; now, a slight shower began to sprinkle, the lightning flared up with a red flame, and the thunder growled angrily and heavily.”

22. Observe here the felicity of the metaphor: the cloud rests, the air trembles and is soon shaken, the darkness runs over the ground, and the thunder growls in anger. Only the eye which sees at bottom life in Nature's forces could see them in such vivifying images.

23. Lastly, the fourth great virtue of Turgenef's art is his intense power of sympathy.